I was excited to see Goodfellas when it opened in 1990. Excited because it was a Martin Scorsese movie—maybe more precisely because it was a Scorsese gangster movie. Excited because it was based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, about the lowlife mobster Henry Hill, which as far as I’m concerned remains the best book ever written about how organized crime actually works. I was also excited by the cast, which included Robert De Niro, Lorraine Bracco, and Joe Pesci and was led by the then young actor Ray Liotta, who died this week at 67 and is the reason I’m writing this now.
Like a lot of people, I came out of Goodfellas raving about how good it was. The acting, the beautifully tooled dialogue, the baroque tracking shots—it was virtuoso movie-making at its best. The only instance where I parted with the crowd was in its shock and awe at Liotta’s performance as Henry Hill. I did not begrudge them their delight or their surprise at how good he was, and I certainly didn’t think they were wrong. It was a strong performance. Liotta may have had a lot of Class A help, but still, he carries that movie from first to last.
What I did not say, because I don’t like it when people think I’m insane, is that he could’ve done better. Because he could've. Because I’d seen him do it, and so had you if you saw Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, which came out four years earlier.
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In that movie, Liotta doesn’t even show up until about a third of the way in, when he slithers up to Melanie Griffith on the dance floor at their high school reunion and croons, in a voice that all at once contains syrup and strychnine and a world filled with all kinds of hurt, “Hiya, Audrey.”
As you may recall, in Something Wild, uptight Wall Streeter Jeff Daniels lets himself get hauled off for a nooner by a total stranger, the madcap Melanie Griffith, and somehow this quickly turns into a weekend road trip to Pennsylvania, which Daniels finances with petty cash from his office’s Christmas fund.
For a good half hour, we laugh while Daniels sinks further and further into trouble, but it’s his trouble not ours, so who cares? It’s all played for laughs. He sweats, we chuckle. It’s a screwball comedy where, as we all know because of all the other screwball comedies we’ve seen, the dizzy dame is going to get her slow-pony boyfriend to discover his humanity—while he’s falling in love with her, too, of course. And Something Wild is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. It’s one of the best screwball comedies ever made. Until it isn’t.
The moment Liotta enters the picture, the temperature drops about 20 degrees, and in the space of about 10 minutes—the time it takes Ray and his date to insinuate themselves in with Griffith and Daniels and then drive from the reunion to a quikmart that Liotta robs—we find ourselves in another movie altogether. And a very dark, very scary movie it is, and all because of Ray Liotta.
Because never for a single second—and this is even true when you watch the movie a second or third time—do you stop believing that this man on the screen is a stone-cold killer, capable of anything at any time. You never think, ooh, what a performance. He doesn’t give you the time to think. You can’t stop watching him, and you can’t stop being scared. And did I say how charming he is throughout? Likable even, for a little while. Psychopath? Sociopath? Maybe, but mental illness isn’t really the issue at hand. Labeling Ray Sinclair, the character Liotta plays, doesn’t make him any less terrifying.
So yeah, when I saw Liotta’s performance in Goodfellas, I admired it. I even got lost in it now and then and more or less forgot he was an actor in a movie. He’s very good in that film. But Henry Hill is a bit of a mug. The real joy of Goodfellas is staying a step or two ahead of him the whole way. We know he’s going to screw up. It’s just a question of how and when. Given a part like that, Liotta is going to turn in a fine performance, but there’s no room for menace in Henry, and menace is what Liotta always did best.
So when people eulogize Ray Liotta for his performance in Goodfellas, I’m not going to complain. But I’m going to be thinking, if you really wanted to see how totally great this guy could be, how he does that thing that only great screen villains know how to do and make you simultaneously terrified and yet unable to stop watching the screen, then you have to watch Something Wild. It’ll teach you everything you need to know about just how great Ray Liotta was.
